It doesn’t matter if you’re ready or not

Remember when I crashed the car?

I backed up and nothing, and there was this smell; the car was growling like a mad dove. There wasn’t even any pain, at least not physically, but mentally, the same anger that I tried to run away from year after year, and it came to this point, to the fire, to the bruising of fingers and that smell and to that color, the red of it all and from drops of insanity I touched with tips my very own dripping head, and pain, still not physically, even though my body was shell-shocked from the impact I remember snapping out of my depression as soon as the music stopped. The impact into the oak sobered me up.

I have always known pain, and who knows where it began. I think some people are just born this way, born in angst, and this, is just, the way they are.

Some of them give into the destruction that tastes bitter. Some people work with the anger and the pain and use it to go further than most would think possible. I’ve always used my anger, my pain, my nightmares and my lust for darkness, and it comes in waves, and now, as my car couldn’t move I knew that they were coming for me. Society doesn’t let you get away with things like this, especially when the locals have a scene on their hands. I thought I could get the car back into gear, only grinding sounds and, man oh man please fucking start. Nothing…

I can’t really remember much, and yeah, this fog…

And it’s not as if my life has always been overwhelmed by ugliness. I haven’t been abused or neglected, for the most part, and yeah, I had good parents. They did the best they could for a kid like me. I was bored in first grade. I ran away in second grade. I fell in love in third grade. I dropped out in fifth grade. Since I can remember I’ve constantly been running away from civilization, running with the demons and the nightmares that provide me with some kind of irrational protection within the arms of my dreams.

It’s always been like this, it’s always been this fear that has propelled me into a lonely life, and happiness is good for some people, but I wanted to get beyond happiness, and I lost it man, and I went too far that night, and shit, this time, this time there would be a sentence, jail, hospital bills, court costs, and they all loved as much as they could and gave and gave and cursed the son and the god, as well as the saints and spirits alike, they asked priests and said what can we do to make him happy, but nothing, and nothing worked and I wasn’t happy, and I broke my toys and I slept in trees and I ran down into the forests until the sun poured out its soul to the humans below who were sane and were not me, to the kids who rode bikes on the fourth of July, the kids who loved their schooling and the kids who wanted to know what was wrong with me, why he climbs trees and never wants anything new, why he runs around in overalls and doesn’t wear shoes, why he sings to his shadow under the willow and why he jumps to school to school and church to church and never obeys his mom and dad like us good kids do, and my god oh how they tried, my parents defeated, held up their hands and said nothing works and they said we’ve done all we can do, we’ve done everything we were trained to do by our parents.

They were great, and the thing was that I was an old man before I was ten, and I found out, and man, adoption is never easy. Something was different with my eyes and blood, the blood that ran through me was wild, domestication was bred out of me generations ago. I was lost from a tribe that has long been forgotten. They always knew, and they tried. They loved and I gave love back, and one day I was gone. That’s just how it happened.

And love, these words to them, only words, not real concepts and trust wasn’t real, and looking back at them, well I don’t really know who they were, and they were really only young kids themselves. People had children before they were adults and the American dream was something different in the nineteen eighties in what was known as an uphill battle that spread out from the center of the delusional middle class breeding ground known as, suburbia.

We played around oil fields and lived on baseball diamonds. Whole towns were converted from old world war two bases. Broken helicopters and tanks were just over there down the train tracks that you could ride on the back of at night, and to do what? Man just to play, just to be a kid and dream about the war that you will fight one day when you’re a man, when you’re ready.

We were raised as if we were preparing for war. And the real war never came, and back there away from the building blocks of socialization, down by the creek, well this was where I became the caged animal that I am today. This is where the poetry began to form. None of us were ready for any of this, and we still aren’t ready, but the end doesn’t ask us if were ready, because it just, ends…